


We'll Trade Our Starving Eyes

by jusrecht



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:30:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jusrecht/pseuds/jusrecht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thomas. As a child, growing up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We'll Trade Our Starving Eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [duckgirlie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckgirlie/gifts).



**Note:** I’m really sorry that this ended up more like an original story that a Downton Abbey fic. In fact it doesn't have anything to do with Downton Abbey in general, but this was the only idea that occurred to me.

 

–

 

 _[ Like any other, Thomas was once a child._

 _Just a child. ]_

 

The sky above him was always grey.

If London prided herself of one thing, then it was the constant shroud of anonymity she offered to her masses. To Thomas’s young eyes, the fog and smoke and dreary clouds turned passing pedestrians into mere dark-cloaked, high-collared wraiths. He used to watch them—ambling past with or without purpose, simply another shade of grey—from a grimy window at the front of his father’s small, poorly-lit shop. He watched them every day, his only company the steady, sonorous ticking from dusty wooden shelves which lined the wall. Clocks of various shapes and sizes stared at him from the hood of shadow, hundreds of them.

Try as he might, Thomas could not dislike the gloom. It was the only thing he knew. There was never a storybook to tempt him with a dash of blue in a painted sky, or abundance of green in the imaginary vastness of a meadow, deep in England’s countryside. With his mind so confined and his creativity as good as bridled, fantasy was an uncharted realm he could not delve even in dreams.

The one thing little Thomas did regret, and dislike, was the constant waste of his daily effort. No matter how industriously he rubbed and scrubbed, even the most carefully polished brass would lose its lustre in the shop’s meagre light. It made almost no difference how careful the hands which made them, or how delicate the woodwork which framed their telling faces; to his eyes, they all looked the same: miserable, forlorn, waiting for the day their hands would stop.

Once, Thomas tried to make a suggestion, but Pa barely even glanced at him, and the hurt, the fear that the old man would never again heed him was terrifying enough to keep his mouth shut. He would wait, until he was older and the time came for him to handle the business; then everything would gleam, proudly parading their colours instead of ashamed of them.

But when his father died, he was still a child of eleven—not nearly old enough. There was no funeral, only a small burial with neither priest nor mourners, and then two men appeared on the doorstep, speaking brusquely about debts and obligations and how his father had had no decency to at least fulfil them before his death. Thomas understood nothing except one: he was to go to an orphanage.

That night, his last night in the only home he had ever known, he took a silver pocket watch from a wooden case sitting on the topmost shelf and said goodbye to the rest.

 

–

 

 _[ And like any other, life carried him to places he would rather not go. ]_

 

After two weeks in the orphanage, Thomas ran away.

The beating, coming as regularly as the sun would rise and set each day, was a new experience for him. His father had been a quiet, stolid man with lines of worries etched deep on his brow, never one for mindless violence or an unnecessary display of force. The first time it had happened, Thomas cried and howled until his throat was sore and parched from the salt of his tears. The hatred swelling inside him was thick and black, first of many.

But his clothes were thin and his boots old, and as night fell, his regret swelled. To return, however, was not an option; the punishment waiting for him would have been enough to cripple him for the rest of his life. It was then that he learned one thing about his father’s small, bleak shop—the gloom within was a comfort compared to the darkness without. As the cold wind bit into his bones, he curled behind the weathered trunk of an old tree and wept himself to sleep. This was bitterness, and it was unlike any other emotion he had ever felt before, even the deep hatred which still coursed as steadily as blood in his veins.

When he opened his eyes, there were four faces looking down at him, none of them familiar.

 

\---

 

 _[ Like any other, he met people he would rather not meet. ]_

 

“You’re out of your mind!”

Thomas crouched even lower and tried to make himself disappear by huddling as close as possible to the rough bark which had been his pillow for the night. Fear was by now a thoroughly familiar enemy, and he watched through fearful eyes as two of the four men bickered.

“At least I know a moneybag when I see one,” a thin man with a smooth, cultured voice answered to the fat, unruly one who had first spoken.

“A moneybag? Look at him!”

“No, you look at him. What’s the use of those eyes on your head if you can’t even see what I’m talking about?”

“I see a dirty, scrawny boy and just another mouth to feed! We can’t afford a stupid wager like this with winter just a month away!”

The thin one made a small, impatient noise through his nose. “Wait here,” he retorted and then approached Thomas with awkward, limping steps. Strong fingers dragged him by the collar of his shirt, down to a small stream with its mossy rocks and slow-flowing water.

When he returned, he was shivering as the morning breeze teased the icy coolness latching onto his skin—but his face had been rubbed clean and his hair combed back. The other three looked at him first with uncomprehending eyes, and then open astonishment.

“Fine, he’s good-looking enough,” the fat man finally spoke, gruff and sour. “But can he do the job? Looks like a ninny who will piss in his shorts at the sight of an audience to me.”

The thin one smiled and there was a glint in his cunning eyes as he peered at Thomas’s frightened face. “Then he will have to learn, or else.”

 

–

 

 _[ Learned arts he would rather not learn. ]_

 

In some ways, gratitude was not entirely absent when he considered this ragtag band of travelling actors who had taken him. There were fourteen members in all, each claiming a talent limited to his own person. Thomas made the fifteenth, the youngest and a slave in many ways.

The bickering two which had decided his fate sat at the top of their hierarchy. The Fat One, as Thomas had come to call him in his mind’s shelter, was their short-tempered leader, and he nearly always argued with the Thin One, who was their scriptwriter and also most talented actor despite his limp. There were many stories surrounding his person, as a kinder member once told Thomas, and the most popular was of one night when he had managed to reduce the entire audience, ladies and gentlemen alike, to tears through his performance as Shylock.

This kinder member had made the third of the group who had found him. He was the Silent One, for he spoke very little except when he was alone with Thomas and together they spent nights by the fire reading from his books of plays. The fair Ophelia! he would recite and Thomas would listen, enraptured. Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remember'd.

The last of the four was a hunchbacked man who, in Thomas’s opinion, was of absolutely no use to either their group or the theatre business. The only reason why he was among them, living off money he did not earn, was because he was related to the Fat One. He eyed Thomas with his black beads of eyes

And so he was one of them. Thomas was neither happy nor sad with this turn his life had taken, but he relished every new experience. Their journey took him to places he had never had an inkling of as they performed in various conditions. Sometimes the stage was little more than a rickety platform in a large barn of a country farm, but there were also proper buildings with proper seats, with high painted ceilings above his head and polished wood under his feet and a sweep of red velvet curtains clutched between his fingers. He took these all in with something close to wonder, even as his feet quivered at the thought of his turn—to perform before more strangers than had ever visited his father’s old shop. The Thin One had taken to teach him how to read, but his impatience proved a great hindrance to his teaching that afterwards Thomas would always run to the Silent One, who would then explain his mistakes kindly.

The best thing, however, was neither the puzzling art of acting nor the certainty of enough food every day to keep any real hunger at bay. It was to see the bluest sky and greenest grass, to cast his sight as far as the horizon where they would fund each other. He would, one day, live in a place where he could see this sky and feel this grass and scent such freedom.

Thomas decided that he could live for that.

 

–

 

 _[ And did things he would rather not do. ]_

 

During his first performance, Thomas fell on the stage.

The Fat One took a cane after the audience had dispersed, and for the first time in months, Thomas knew physical pain once more. The Hunchback cackled in a corner at his screamed pleas as the Thin One watched in cold silence. The Silent One was nowhere to be seen.

From then on, the roar of laughter followed his every step, the fear of failure haunting every memorised line. His voice quivered so during a rehearsal that the Fat One threw his smoking pipe at him and curse after curse spilled from his mouth. Thomas remained standing where he was only because he could not move either of his feet, petrified in fright as they were.

“I can’t do this,” he whispered to the Silent One that night, when everyone else had gone to bed. He began to hate Juliet, Desdemona, all the pretty names which had once filled his mind with the first taste of imagination.

“I disliked it too at first,” the Silent One answered, solemn, “to hear people laugh at me although it was my job to make them laugh.”

Thomas’s eyes widened. “It was?”

The man laughed then, a low, quiet sound that rumbled pleasantly in the small room. “Back then we couldn’t afford to play Shakespeare. I was recruited because I was good with my hands, perfect for a jester.”

“A jester!”

“And a very successful one too.” His smile was now almost a grin. “Oh but how I hated it. I derived no pleasure from making my audience laugh—it was no art for me.”

Thomas was thoughtful for a moment, but then he shook his head. “It wasn’t the same. They laughed because I made a mistake and hum– humali– made a fool of myself in front of them.”

The hand which caressed his head was gentle, indulging. “That is what actors do, lad. We humiliate ourselves in public for others’ amusement.”

“Then I don’t want to be an actor,” Thomas said stubbornly. The laughter rang again in the hollow of his mind and he could feel the familiar hotness of tears prickling his eyes; he looked away to spare himself further embarrassment.

It was then that he felt the soft touch to his lips—a thumb, caressing slowly as the rest cradled his chin. Thomas would have recoiled but so gentle a touch was a mystery to him, a child used only to cruel fists or none at all. He stared at this man’s kind eyes, a mishmash of fear, curiosity, and yearning thickening inside him.

“This will make you feel better,” the Silent One said, very gently, and his hands which guided Thomas to the narrow bedding and later glided over his naked skin were no less so.

He was twelve.

 

–

 

 _[ Like any other, he learned that there was always a black to any white. ]_

 

The cruel fists came later.

They came out of the blue and caught him off guard—for the Silent One had never, not even once, raised his voice at him, let alone a hand. The touches he did not mind so much, and if he was sore for days on end afterwards, it was nothing he could not bear; as long as the Silent One was kind to him, Thomas could not bring himself to argue.

But if it was the Fat One, then perhaps it would not have mattered so much.

“Do as I ask,” the Silent One said instead, his voice soft still and yet the threat underneath ever present. “Do as I say and none of us will be hurt.”

Thomas nodded; keeping the tears at bay, he got on all fours.

Meanwhile the hatred grew and festered.

 

–

 

 _[ And like any other, he learned that there was a price in kindness—always. ]_

 

 _  
**End**   
_


End file.
